Assignment: Concepts to public health
Assignment: Concepts to public health
A poem by T.S. Eliot (1943) says, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” As your experience in this course comes to a close, I don’t want you to miss the meaning of the materials you have read, papers you have written, and discussions we have had throughout the session. They are more than a series of assignments and grades—the end result should be an improvement in your higher-order thinking and your ability to make connections between thoughts and ideas. You can achieve that through reflection, the art of taking charge of your own mind.
Reflection is a mental process that challenges you to use critical thinking to examine the course information, analyze it carefully, make connections with previous knowledge and experience, and draw conclusions based on the resulting ideas. A well-cultivated critical thinker (Paul & Elder, 2008):
Raises vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely;
Gathers and assesses relevant information, using abstract ideas to interpret it effectively; comes to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards;
Thinks open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought, recognizing and assessing, as need be, their assumptions, implications, and practical consequences; and
Communicates effectively with others in figuring out solutions to complex problems.
For this discussion, take some time to reflect upon two concepts that you learned in this course. What are the concepts? What insight or ideas did you gain from learning each of these concepts? Were there aspects of the concepts that you would challenge? What is the importance of these concepts to public health? How will you use this new wisdom in your current or future career?
To earn maximum credit, the comment should be more than your opinion, and more than a quick “off the top of your head” response. Be sure to support your statements, cite sources properly, cite within the text of your comments, and list your reference(s). The response must be a minimum of 250 words.
Britton, B. & Serrat, O. (2013). Reflective Practice. Retrieved from
Eliot, T. S. (1944). Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages, pt. 2. London.
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
